Many power currents course through Verdi’s Don Carlo: love, loyalty, friendship, politics, war, religion. We can ponder which dominates. Every performance shifts the balance. The thicket of versions, whether in French as Don Carlos, or Italian – Don Carlo – as in the Royal Opera House’s current revival, adds to the sense of instability (as well as to our own inadequacy in mastering every loop of the work’s complex history). Forgetting editions and yielding to the work in the theatre, its magnificence and its cry for liberty win out.
This time Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 production, designed by Bob Crowley and revived by Dan Dooner, has one ingredient that could silence all other discussion: the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, making her role debut as Elizabeth of Valois. Davidsen has turned to Verdi after a concentration on German repertoire, notably Wagner. Hers is the voice of a lifetime, still developing, still exploring. Her musicality, her ability to sing softly (she has been accused of being consistently loud, far from the case here), her gift for unleashing ever more warmth on a sustained high note, are exceptional. She acts sympathetically, though the angular progress of the libretto, a reworking of Schiller’s play, gives limited chance for characterisation: Elizabeth falls in love with Don Carlo on first sight. By her next entry, through an enforced political marriage, she has become his stepmother.
